Space/Place (selected)
From 2003 to 2010, I photographed mental health facilities in New York, Florida, and Indiana. When I started this series, I was working at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. As part of my daily routine, I walked through two contrasting sites: the original 19th-century, Kirkbride-esque structure, repurposed as offices, and an adjoining late 1990s steel and corporate green glass construction. I thought about the history and effects of institutional “therapeutic” space, and wondered how these charged environments could be documented ethically. I knew from the beginning that I didn’t want to photograph people—to violate anyone's privacy—or to recycle tropes of decrepitude in long-abandoned psychiatric facilities. Photographing a range of structures of containment and treatment, I witnessed how some “spaces” were transformed—through signage, art works, graffiti, personal items of comfort—into “places” that suggested the agency of the people who inhabited them, and how others changed in the movement from psychotherapeutic to pharmacological models of care.